Can police track online activity?
Posted by admin | Filed under Law Enforcement Police
Through Email and instant messaging? I was wondering if the local police can do this (not FBI or CIA or anything) if you’re not Emailing them or nobody sends the convos to them or anything? Can they read your convorsations you had with other people? I was wondering because I find that to be an infringement of rights…
Yeah, im one of those perv’s at 17 years of age.
massmailsoftware.com
August 6th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
They can if they have a Warrant or Probable cause (a Judge usually has to ok it before a Cop is allowed to do such a thing)
August 8th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
they do it all the time mosty because of p.o.L .to protect teens.
August 10th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
what rights??… the right to do whatever you want… the right to enjoy illegal activities? explain please…
August 12th, 2008 at 10:56 am
hmmm 1966GTO what you been doing wrong that your worried about???
IF there is a complaint sent to them regarding your user name/ email account… they CAN and will go to your ISP and track you…. I can’t say they can get instant messages but umm in this day and age I would think it’s possible..
SOOOO If your one of those pervs out looking for kids on line.. watch your step… someone WILL find you.
Edit added 7-6
Well you know… 17 trying to hook up with a 12 to 14 yr old.. kiddo.. ITS STILL JAIL BAIT!
August 13th, 2008 at 2:47 am
Can it be done, sure. They would have to get a warrant or at the very least a subpoena for the records. No ISP is going to release the info with out those. Any info they got without the proper judicial involvement would be worthless in court and a violation of the law.
August 14th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Yeah everything is possible with the Patriot Act. They can basically subpoena email, and text messages from the Internet provider if they have probable cause. Go ahead, and send the police a threatening email, and see what happens.
August 16th, 2008 at 9:05 am
They sure can. My local sheriff’s office has a computer forensics department, and I asked them to look into some things for me. They were able to verify what I suspected. They can read the computer language and anything you ever had on your computer can most likely be accessed. Info you delete is simply marked as space that can be recorded over. But if it isn’t recorded over, it is still accessible to someone who has that type of training. Like the others said, there would have to be proper paperwork in order such as a subpoena if there was concern about laws being broken. But someone trained in that area could do it without you even knowing it, too.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
To get that kind of information they must first obtain a warrent. However, in accordence to the USA PATRIOT Act if they consider you a flight risk they have the authority to delay telling you when they serve that warrent.
Once the warrent is recieved there are a couple things that can happen. The most basic of which is they court order a website to get your information. For example I have seen MySpace court ordered for information before. They respond to the order in just a few hours. They will send your IP Address. Useing a law enforcement program, they can track the usage of that signal. In the case I was reffering to before, the result came back with not only the location of the building, but what story of the apartment complex, and in some cases the very room. This is easy and happens all the time.
The other option is more complicated. This would be where they get a search warrant and comfiscate your computer. Once they do this, they have free rein over the entire computer. They can easily get email records, usually get instant messager records too. They are all saved on your computer somewhere. Furthermore, a popular hollywood exaggeration is actually true; if you delete files on your computer they can still be recoved. I have seen it happen. You can’t actually delete anything on your computer, a trace remains.
If you don’t do anything wrong your rights won’t be violated. But if their is enough evidence that cops can get a judge to sign a warrant, chances are you need to use the internet for something more…appropriate.
Hope that helps!
August 21st, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Actually the patriot act gives them the right to monitor all communications without a warrant hence the NSA’s project Echelon. For evidence to be used in court a court ordered tap must be in place. Then again who’s to say when the evidence was actually obtained as to when the court order was issued.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:24 am
Yes to everything.
Everything you write, every web page you visit, every download you receive, all of your email. Every credit card transaction.
Every Last thing you do.
August 23rd, 2008 at 5:07 am
If they can show cause they could get a warrant to gather all that info. So…..keep yourself relatively clean and you should be fine perv.
August 25th, 2008 at 7:07 am
yes. even scarier is that most new phones have GPS. they can tell where / what city / location the call/ text/ im was made from.
off course it is in infringement of rights …. but the fact is our rights are being eroded every single day.
very good practice to be careful in your writing in emails / texts /ims, etc. so that you are not misunderstood.
August 26th, 2008 at 5:11 am
Not usually. Most municiple departments might have an internet crimes/fraud division, however they are not capable of tracking emails, IM’s, internet usage, etc. from their facilities. This is because…
#1 The cost of having the equipment, operators, and the time it would take to implement it all is too big of a burden for the department to support.
#2 Internet crime is difficult to enforce because if someone in my town is being defrauded over the internet, the criminal could be in another state or even country so the local police can do very little about it anyway. Also, internet crimes most often fall under federal juridiction, so the local police would have to get the feds involved anyway, so it is a lot more efficient to have them just handle it.
Local departments do however work in close cooperation with federal agencies like the FBI in handling complaints and investigating crimes done over the internet.
August 29th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
The local cops don’t do much more than hand out tickets, direct traffic, break up arguments, and dispatch.
Detectives are the ones that go as undercover, or do whatever background research to catch online predators and crimes. Some places even have their own internet crimes division now.